Stone Spring by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online Page A

them calling, and more men came running to join in. She struggled and spat and bit, but the punches rained down, and she was weakening fast.
    And, as if through a bloody haze, she remembered Moon Reacher. She forced her head to left, right, and there she was. A man held the girl up in the air with one big paw around her wrists, and with his other hand he was pulling away her skins like peeling a berry. Reacher’s leg was injured; blood streamed down from a wound in her thigh.
    Dreamer stopped fighting. She looked around until she found the single Coward woman. As naked as the rest, and as garishly tattooed, she stood away from the men, nursing a bruised arm. ‘Please!’ Dreamer yelled until the woman looked at her, and met her eyes. ‘Please - the little girl - she is only a child - you’re a woman, help her—’
    The woman could never understand her words. The language of the people and of the Cowards had nothing in common. But she shared some basic humanity. She stepped over to the man with Reacher. She slapped him until he let the girl go, and she gestured at Dreamer, on the ground. Take what you want over there. She dragged Reacher away, out of Dreamer’s sight.
    The men were getting organised. One held her arms up over her head, another two, crouching, held her legs open. A younger man, not much more than a boy, ran his hands over her big belly and her milk-swollen breasts, as if fascinated. Then the men started clapping, and another approached her, a huge bull of a man with a swirling blood-red tattoo on his belly. He was already erect, she saw, his penis like a spear shaft, tattooed along its length and with what looked like a splinter of bone through the glans. He leaned over her and grinned.
    She worked her aching mouth, summoning up one more mouthful, and spat blood and mucus in his face. That earned her a punch in the head, and the world fell away.

7
    The Year of the Great Sea: Spring Equinox.

    A few days before the Spring Walk, Jurgi the priest decreed that Mama Sunta’s time of laying-out was done. He came to speak to the sisters in their house, the house that had been Sunta’s, and now belonged to Zesi, as the oldest surviving woman of the family.
    Zesi’s house it might be - but the house was full of the Pretani boys, their sprawling beds of bracken and moss and skins, their spears and nets. The Pretani evidently liked it here at Etxelur. They’d stayed as winter turned to spring, and now they were even talking of staying all the way to the summer solstice and the Giving. So, after months and months, they were still here. To Ana’s nostrils the house stank of their filthy deerskin tunics and their meat-laden farts, and the acrid smells of their maleness.
    Then there were the fights. Once Gall had tried to bring a woman to his bed: Pina, a young widow known to be generous with her body. Zesi had flown into a rage, and had hurled Gall’s bedding out of the house: ‘Get that slack-uddered cow out of my home!’ For days afterwards Gall had pulled down his lower eyelids every time Zesi passed, evidently a Pretani sign for jealousy.
    And rare was the morning when he wouldn’t clamber out of bed naked, stretching, displaying an erection like a stabbing spear.
    Sometimes Ana dreamed of burning it all down - or, better yet, she imagined the house being smashed by some great storm, or a tide from the sea. She feared that this was the voice of her Other, the owl, the death bird; she feared this was the darkness that had been discovered inside her the night Sunta died.
    Certainly this polluted house wasn’t a place where she wanted to discuss the details of her grandmother’s burial.
    But the priest, composed as ever, picked his way through the Pretani debris without a murmur or a glance, and sat with the women by the warmth of the night fire. He began, ‘I know it seems a long time since Sunta’s death, at the solstice full moon—’
    ‘We remember when it was,’ Zesi snapped.
    ‘My point is, the